more brain mushrooms. it's a good year. today i cooked up a spaghetti sauce with them, and frying in butter did make all the difference. i get it now. before i just thought it's supposed to be such a tasty mushroom, so i always made risotto to enjoy the pure flavour that wasn't really there. this was different. so good...
recipes of my cooking have been requested, but i find it difficult. my meals happen so haphazardly, like the other day when i was weeding behind the sauna and accidentally unearthed / broke off a tiny asparagus bud, the size of a moth cocoon, which i initially mistook it for. i brought it in, chopped it up with a clove of garlic and a couple of nettle shoots, boiled it all up with a whisked egg and added some white miso, probably some nori flakes on top, and that was my soup for lunch. or the falafel i made with the leftovers of that false morel risotto from the last post, nettle hummus, and canned bean + frozen peas mash, where i added an egg, breadcrumbs and rye flour until firm enough to form into balls, breaded them in some spiced up breadcrumbs and fried into golden deliciousness in olive oil.
even this pasta dinner happened before i knew it, i thought i was going to use the leftover breadcrumbs to batter and deep fry my mushrooms, but all of a sudden i was making sauce instead. and since i put a bit of cream into it, and the stovetop was still warm, i steeped lemon peel in the rest of the cream for a while before whipping up yet another batch of caramel sauce, this time lemon & clove (ultimate combination!) with a dash of cointreau. i realized i had accidentally bought wrong kind of sugar, though. i meant to grab a bag of cane sugar, which is so much better for caramel and syrup than beet sugar, which is the norm in finland. beet sugar makes caramel gooey and it tends to crystallize in syrup form. i'm under the impression that cane sugar has more minerals in it, too. unrefined, of course.
the herbs on top of the dish are the first chives and parsley springing up from the ground. the parsley was so tiny it felt silly to even pick it, but it's supposedly an antidote to poison (hence its appearance next to almost any dish, as a reassurance to guests) so i wanted to add some just in case.
